The present invention relates to policies for software applications, network management, e-commerce or business and the like, and more particularly to a system and method to distribute policies or the like.
Policies may be defined or developed to control software applications, network management, e-commerce or business or similar communication or data processing activities. Such policies may include “if-then” clauses or similar statements or definitions. An example of one policy may be “if some precondition, then perform some predefined action, or set some value or the like.” In another example, the policy may be “if some precondition and some other precondition or preconditions, then perform some predefined action, set some value or the like.” Policies can have a typical lifecycle. Over time, policies may be updated to meet changing conditions or needs or may become outdated and deleted or changed to new policies. Efficiently defining, storing, distributing and enforcing policies can be a challenge. Under some circumstances only minor changes or selected parameters or values used in a policy or related group of polices may need to be changed. Defining an entirely new policy or set of policies, storing the entirely new policy or policies, distributing the policies to all enforcement points and making adjustments at each of the enforcement points to implement and enforce the policies may be burdensome, time consuming and involve inefficient use of limited data processing, storage and communication resources.